Tuesday, March 13, 2012

I’m bored of this UX event

If this is you, get out of the way. I’m off to the IA Summit
next week and it’s the highlight of my year. Honestly. If you want to bring
your event-weary commentary along with you and bemoan the fact that it wasn’t
like it was 10 years ago then if you don’t mind having that conversation with
yourself that would be lovely. I don’t know if I mentioned, but it’s the
highlight of my year. Some people never get to go to events at all.

Really, I’ve nothing wrong with some kind of constructive
criticism of events and conferences, and that has appropriate channels, to make
sure it gets back to the organisers. You know, the event organisers. That small
army of people who took upon themselves 11 months ago to make the event in 11
months the most awesome event in eleven month’s time it can possibly be
notwithstanding the fact that actually no we’re not getting paid to put this
thing together and we possibly didn’t realise 11 months ago what a monumental
task we agreed to be a part of and now it’s upon us we could literally weep with
the joy and relief of letting loose the staggering waif of the fawny event calf
as it teeters into the forest of discovery like some conference Bambi, slipping
and sliding on the ice of enlightenment, growing, living, flourishing and
maturing into that majestic stag of experience, standing proudly atop mount
adversity, barking, or whatever stags do, I AM THE EVENT STAG, HEAR ME BARK, OR
WHATEVER IT IS I DO. What you probably don’t want to hear at that point is “Yeah,
that event stag isn’t as good as last year’s event stag. It’s a bit shit. I’m
going #sightseeing. Who’s in?”.

If you really are having a bad experience at your event,
conference, meetup, bootcamp, jam, summit, unevent, unconference, unmeetup,
unbootcamp, unjam, unsummit, (unjam is a word? Who knew?), then I’m sorry about
that. Not all events are as advertised. Not all events run smoothly. Not all
events meet expectations. But it might be just you. Well, maybe you and a
couple of others. Alright, maybe it’s really bad. But if you’re quietly
snarking at the back, that’s fine, I can deal with that. I mean, it’s annoying
and once I’ve noticed you doing that I can’t unnotice you doing that and you’ve
already planted a seed of distraction that will grow like a triffid in my
subconscious, like some venomous metaphor for something really distracting and
vegetative. However, in a parallel universe-made-the-opposite-of-parallel, it’s
now pretty much alright to do that snarking out loud. And when I say out loud,
I obviously don’t actually mean out loud. I mean on the #backchannel, which isn’t
a backchannel at all, but a Norwegian bridge that small children skip lightly
across to get from #whatisthis?land to #Ilovethis!land with faces that radiate
with pure delight, but being a Norwegian bridge, thereunder treads a recalcitrant
troll, lobbing poo bags at minors squawking BLAH BLAH BLAH I’M BETTER THAN
THIS. Even worse, some trolls have got so good at lobbing their poo bags of
derision that they can make them stick when they’re not even at the event.